| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must
not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs.
Samuel Budget, the wife of the successful merchant! The best
of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all
their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental
questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.
A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for
people who would spend years together and not bore themselves
to death. But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and
about life. To dwell happily together, they should be versed
in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: There is universal agreement on that point; in fact, the agreement as
to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the conviction
that politicians will do nothing practical to interfere with them.
In Ireland, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald says that intemperance leads to
nineteen-twentieths of the crime in that country, but no one proposes a
Coercion Act to deal with that evil. In England, the judges all say
the same thing. Of course it is a mistake to assume that a murder, for
instance, would never be committed by sober men, because murderers in
most cases prime themselves for their deadly work by a glass of Dutch
courage. But the facility of securing a reinforcement of passion
undoubtedly tends to render always dangerous, and sometimes
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: 'My son,' said the captain, 'you better do your level best, or
you'll see sights!'
'O yes,' said Huish. 'O crikey, yes!' He looked across at Herrick
with a toothless smile that was shocking in its savagery;
and his ear caught apparently by the trivial expression he had
used, broke into a piece of the chorus of a comic song which he
must have heard twenty years before in London: meaningless
gibberish that, in that hour and place, seemed hateful as a
blasphemy: 'Hikey, pikey, crikey, fikey, chillingawallaba dory.'
The captain suffered him to finish; his face was unchanged.
'The way things are, there's many a man that wouldn't let
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